


Just Another Time Travel Story

by Rathe



Series: Just Another Time Travel Story [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, M/M, Stiles Stilinski Has Powers, still angsty from stiles' pov
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 15:09:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15122090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rathe/pseuds/Rathe
Summary: Stiles had rules. Stiles had principles. Stiles had morals.Stiles had even more dead friends.---He once made the promise to himself, that he would never use his ability to time travel to alter the past. Then, like, everybody died? And he was like "Eh, how much worse can I make it?"For once, altering the past was a pretty good move. Except, you know, Stiles-with-PTSD is suddenly in a happy sunshine world.But really, he only delayed the darkness. Beacon Hills is facing new threats, but as the Hales scramble to deal with these new problems, Stiles is like "Whoa, you guys are freaking out over some basic season 2 level ish. Calm it down, PTSD-Stiles got this."





	Just Another Time Travel Story

**Author's Note:**

> I legit have not watched Teen Wolf for years. I haven’t read a Sterek fic in nearly that long. I will get plot points from the TV show wrong, actually I'm prolly gonna ignore most of 'em, and I will take characterization into creative, perhaps objectionable, territory.  
> I have no clue why I’m even writing this, but the story idea has been stabbing my brain for years ever since I realized that the Stiles of the current seasons of TW would give up anything to fix what went wrong. If he’d had a fraction of the powers I’ve given him, he’d sure as hell be using them.  
> For all intents and purposes, the Stiles of “Jumping Tunnels” no longer exists in this timeline. He exists in some magical timeline where TW got either canceled around season 3 or somehow ended up turning into a goofy wolf romcom.

Stiles had rules. Stiles had principles. Stiles had morals.

Stiles had even more dead friends.

For years he had promised himself that he wouldn’t intervene, that he would do nothing with his ability to travel through time other than learn and explore. That the tunnels between time periods were to be used for nothing but his own experiences and not for him to interfere with the events of history.

It had been easy, before. It had once been so, so easy to accept the losses. To accept the deaths and the injuries and the nightmares. To talk himself out of fixing the little problems by giving himself a long, winding speech about the butterfly effect. By saying that no matter how bad it got, his meddling could make it a whole lot worse.

That if he saved a life, or revealed to much information, he could end up starting the next world war. Or, worse, bring back JNCO jeans.

It really, he thought, had never been a decision entirely out of practicality. The decision had merely been made out of a lack of motivation. The belief that fucking with time could make thing worse instead of better.

Allison happened. Boyd. Erica. The Nogitsune. He’d become a murderer. He’d become a monster. He’d become a guy too squeamish to even try and fix any of this, even though it would only take a snap of his fingers.

If things went bad, he could change them again. He’d spend the rest of his life changing and twisting fate if it meant the dying could stop. If it meant Scott could have normal life. If it meant his father stopped looking like he had shattered into a million pieces.

He was never going to be able to fix himself. But he could make a world where his friends were safe and alive. He had to.

\---  
He had never talked to Talia Hale. He had talked to her hippy, free-love, werewolf parents for hours. He had held her as a baby. That hadn’t required much talking. Talking to the dead, legendary mother of one of your almost-friends seemed to be crossing a line.

He didn’t give a damn about lines anymore, no matter what his shaking hands said as he rung the doorbell of the Hale house.

“You smell wrong,” was the first thing he heard, when a young girl--it had to be Laura, had to--opened the door with a twisted little expression on her face, “Really wrong.”

Her nearly fell to ground and cried, because he knew what would happen to her, and it had never even mattered to him until now. It had never even been on the top 100 things he considered The Worst about his life. But now he was looking at a girl who all he had ever known of was a body chopped in half and the broken remnants of the family she left behind.

He dropped to his knees and gave the brightest smile he could muster, but her face only got tighter.

“Hi, Laura,” he said, voice soft, “I’m, well, I’m a friend. Can I talk to you mother? It’s very important.”

Laura looked like she’s about to yell for Talia when the woman in question came to the door and gently placed Laura behind her. She was all power and beast lurking beneath the face of a pleasant, young mother. Stiles stood and looked at her, trying to see even a hint of her son in her eyes. It was there, of course, in the looks, but even an Alpha as hardened as Talia Hale lacked the certain element of complete and utter despair hidden in the eyes of her children.

“I’m a friend of your son,” Stiles says, “And I’m here to help you stop your family from dying.”  
\---

He didn’t tell her everything. He told her about Derek and Kate, about the fire, about Paige, and about Malia. He gave her dates and names, gave her some suggestions for fixing the issue, and suggested that she keep Peter far away from her children. Let him take some mostly useless Betas and run a branch pack in Florida or, even better, on Mars.

He never told her his name, she never asked. He explained his abilities, he answered questions about her son and daughter. He cracked a joke about how the Hale family would probably better off modeling that galavanting around as werewolves. She didn’t laugh.

Her face was stone cold and marble white as he told the story. She guided him out of the house with a grim, determined look on her face and thanked him quickly. He gave her an apology, not specifying what it was for, because it was for far too many things.

He ended up spending the next half an hour sobbing in the tunnel between worlds, begging for this to have worked. He couldn’t deal with a life worse than the one he had been living. He couldn’t come back to Beacon Hills and find the place entirely razed to the ground instead of halfway there.

For a second, he tried to stop himself from puking but he eventually just let the vomit come anyway.

\---

He wasn’t even sure what to do, now. He considered for a moment pulling the same thing he did between his mother’s two last breaths: spending years in the past to prepare himself for disaster. That was what he wanted to do. But he needed to see the state of Beacon Hills now, not five years from now. The suspense was ripping out his organs already.

He walked through to door connecting himself to the present.

\---

Cora Hale waved her hand in front of his face, looking more pissed than--well, she’s Cora, the queen on pissed off looks, so that’s to be expected.

“Come on dumbass, what are you daydreaming about? You do this all the goddamn time.”

He gaped as her for a moment and then shrugged.

“Did you even hear me tell you that Derek is coming back home?”

“Derek?”

“Yeah, Derek,” Cora sighs, “My moody brother? He hasn’t come back for a single holiday since he left for college. I would hardly be able to remember what he looks like if mom didn’t force family video chats with him every Saturday. Now that Laura’s getting married he’s finally giving in.”

“Are you happy he’s coming home?” Stiles took a sip of the coffee he didn’t remember ordering, “Even though he’s a dickwad?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Cora sighed, “I don’t know. I miss him. Mom misses him. Laura either acts like he either hung the goddamn moon or cut it down, depending on her mood. I get that he feels guilty about the Kate thing, but…”

“She was a manipulative, homicidal cougar and she’s the one at fault?”

“Exactly!”

It was so surreal, sitting in the Beacon Hills coffee shop, chatting with a girl he hadn’t seen for ages. Nothing seemed like it was going to fall apart. People laughed, drank coffee, and generally acted like people who didn’t live in a town where roughly three people died of mysterious causes per week. Everything was just so calm. Too calm. He felt like his soul was going to crawl out of his skin.

He didn’t exist in this world. He didn’t exist in the world where Cora Hale and he discussed their lives over coffee. He didn’t exist in a world where he could sit and watch streams of light hit the surface of his table and the skin on his hands. He had taken over the life of a Stiles that wasn’t him, of a Stiles that lived in a glittering, perfect world that had never made him watch his friends die, that had never made him run for his life, that had never made him kill.

Cora broke his line of thought with a sniff.

“Do you smell that?” Cora sniffed again, “It smells like somebody took a corpse and started wearing it around like clothes.”

“Sounds like a good sequel to Weekend at Bernie’s,” Stiles took another sip of his coffee, “But it’s probably just your sister’s Bridezilla attitude permeating throughout town.”

Cora laughed.

“Probably.”

**Author's Note:**

> Will write more if y'all want more. I know this is years late


End file.
